The Onion man-in-the-street on Home Depot Layoffs...

55,000 Laid Off Monday | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

"Wait, people work at Home Depot? I've always just gone there, picked out what I needed, then bought it at the self-serve register. Are you sure you have the company name right?"

perhaps there is hope for Change where it matters...

Op-Ed Columnist - Heaven for the Godless? - NYTimes.com:

Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.

from today's PotD

I SO wasn't looking forward to scraping that...

more bad journalism...

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Obama officials try to find Gitmo files:

The article says that the paper spoke to "several former Bush administration officials" who "agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority." But then they quote one of the most absurd denials I've ever heard:

After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

Yeah, that's a denial that should be taken seriously. An anonymous former official in an unknown capacity has a politically convenient explanation asserting that the Obama folks are inventing this as an excuse, yet he admits that he's never actually seen those files himself and he's just going on the word of the Pentagon. Never mind the several highly decorated JAG officers who have resigned as prosecutors and said that they were refused access to exculpatory evidence and that the evidence that they were allowed to see was fragmentary and often based on anonymous sources or on coerced or bribed testimony.

A counter-source that can not openly assert his name, his position, and then claims he no source of knowledge not already presented elsewhere in the article (and accounted for in the original claim), is a useless source.

Yet another sign that "he-said-she-said" in the only thing "journalists" seem able to write anymore.

That's not objective journalism, that's being a lazy shit.

Our Constitutional Right to the Freedom of the Press deserves better than the Press we're getting these days...

I love the rock band Rush

But i want to kill whomever did their website...

Cosmetically, it is fine (though the imagery is big and waiting 6 seconds for every page to load in flash is obnoxious on its own), but they keep trying to (or in IE, succeeding to) resize your window with pretty much every page you click.

Note to web designers: you can resize a popup (by creating the window at the desired size), but thanks to tabs and the like, browsers have a main window and people HATE when you muck around with it.  DON'T DO IT.